New Meat

New Meat is a fast-paced roguelike with turn-based combat made in RPGMaker.

A playthrough of the game consists of five days, where you will venture into the meat dungeon beneath this fast food place in order to harvest monsters and collect enough meat to fulfil your daily quota. The more meat you gather in a day, the more you'll get paid, and the more stat-buffing items you'll be able to buy the following day to help you get even further and collect even more meat. Equipment you find carries over between days as well, allowing you to keep improving your build throughout the week. As well as weapons and armor, you can also find Curios, which provide a passive buff for the rest of your playthrough, and rooms that allow you to upgrade your weapon, picking between several different upgrade paths with their own unique effects.

Before you enter the meat dungeon, you're given a selection of six different primary weapons: the chainsaw, revolver, shotgun, steel gauntlets, knife and the electric guitar. You can only have one primary weapon equipped at once, but you can take all of them with you, so if you start with one and decide you don't like it, you can try out another. As well as this, there are secondary weapons that give you a special move you can use in battle at the cost of some energy. You are given the Ketchup Bottle to start with, but you can find others as you progress through the dungeon.

The gameplay's pretty fast paced, with most battles only taking a few turns, depending on how strong you are. The music remains the same in-battle as outside of battle, which helps give a feeling of momentum, constantly moving forwards, steamrolling enemy after enemy as you progress through the dungeon. In each room, there will usually be a wandering enemy or two, which you must defeat in order to progress to the next room. If you have the right equipment, you can run up behind them while they're moving to ambush them, stunning them for one turn at the start of the battle and giving you a bit of an advantage. As well as these, you can occasionally encounter enemies in breakable pots and trash piles, adding an element of risk to interacting with them, though if you're confident enough with your build, you might deliberately want to find them in order to kill them to get as much meat as you possibly can.

Once you've got enough meat to meet your quota, you can leave the dungeon, returning back to the restaurant to put the meat in the fridge, clock out for the day and collect your paycheck. Alternatively, you can continue to venture deeper and deeper into the dungeon, collecting more meat and items, though the deeper you venture the more dangerous it will be. The more meat you collect, the more money you'll get at the end of the day, though being defeated or having to flee from battle means losing some of the meat you have on you, and potentially even falling below your quota for the day, so there's an element of risk involved.

Despite the gory-sounding premise, the game isn't too dark or horror-focused, having a fun sense of humor and pixel art graphics. If you're sensitive to body horror though, then some of the enemy designs might be a bit disturbing, with the artwork for the fleshy monstrosities that are the enemies being pretty high-quality and detailed.

When it comes to deciding what stats to invest in, all of them matter in some way, which I find pretty cool. The higher your attack, the easier it is to break barrels and other objects that might contain useful items. The higher your agility, the more likely you are to avoid hazards, which can make it easier to reach some areas without taking damage. The higher your E.Attack, the less energy it costs to melt ice blocks, which often have useful items behind them. Investing in a higher max energy means that you're not only able to use more special moves in battle, but also that you have more energy to use outside battle melting ice or attempting to break open crates and barrels. I like how the game does this, as it means it's not always optimal to just min/max like I normally do in games.

There are also occasionally rooms that will have special effects that will change the way battles work a bit, meaning you might have to think about battles a bit differently or strategize around them. Mirror rooms have a chance for energy attacks you use to reflect back at you, and they prevent you from ambushing enemies. Overgrown rooms prevent you and your enemy from using regular attacks for the first few turns, so you should focus on using special moves, using items, or guarding until that effect wears off. There's quite a few different types, and depending on the effect they have, some can hinder you, and others can, in some circumstances, be helpful. I like how these add some variation to how you might go about battles, and how different ones can affect you differently depending on the build you've gone for on that specific playthrough.

I really like how the game handles boss fights. Throughout the game, you can acquire Hearts, which serve as extra lives, bringing you back and being used up if your health falls to zero. When you start a boss fight, your maximum health will be increased significantly, with the amount depending on how many hearts you currently have. By doing this, the bosses are able to have attacks that deal massive amounts of damage while not rendering the boss fights a constant game of healing every other turn and praying you have enough healing items to make it through, which I find that a lot of boss fights in other games I've played end up being. Depending on how you do in the boss fight, you might lose some hearts once the battle's over. I think it depends on how much health you end the battle with, which makes sense given that that extra health came from the hearts you had. Every time you defeat a boss, you get a large amount of meat, as well as an extra heart, and some other random rewards like food items, drinks, etc. Boss fights also have a different music track, and the bosses all feel fairly unique in how they fight, with some inflicting status effects, some draining your health or energy, some giving themselves temporary buffs, etc.

A complete playthrough usually only takes around an hour or two, and you can save at the start or end of a day and come back to the run later if you want. According to the game's Steam page, there are eleven total endings to the game. I've only managed to get five of them so far, so I might keep playing to see if I can get the rest of them!  I also want to try out the rest of the weapons, or some different upgrade paths to the weapons I've used before. Some are a bit harder to get used to than others, but with enough practice and the right stats, I'm sure I'll get the hang of them eventually. I'm not generally the sort of person who plays a lot of RPGs or turn-based games, but even so, I had a lot of fun playing this game!